A Theology for Hipsters (Part 7): The Evolution of Cool (Part 3)

“The times they are a changing” wrote Bob Dylan, and no lyrics seem more fit to describe the era that was, simply, the Sixties. Hippy culture was actually a direct descendant of the Beatnik culture of the 1950s which adopted the habits and ideas of previous generations of dandies, bohemians, and flappers. Beatniks combined the freewheeling lifestyle of the flappers, the political and social subversion of the bohemians, and the rebellion through clothing of the dandies. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs were the most famous of the Beats and they wrote often of their self-imposed exile from the consumerist American dream. They refused to buy into a world where they were forced to become bureaucratic clones dwelling in the suburbs with their white-picket fences and working for “the man” while wearing their suits. Ginsberg most famously depicted the Beatnik dislike of this America in his 1956 poem “Howl,” where he referred to America as “Moloch.”

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind![1]

Beatnik influence on the next generation would result in the largest youth revolution in American history.

Again McCracken offers a summation, stating that the sixties was a rebellion against the idea that technological advance and rationalism could solve the world’s problems. He writes:

The driving force of the youth culture’s rebellion in the sixties was a rejection of the “technocracy” that had come to define America in the postwar era – the massive bureaucracy that was ruled by experts who deified technology, rationalism, and science, and trusted in mechanization and specialization to solve the world’s problems. This technocracy…was a detached system that dismissed creativity, personality, and emotion, but was singularly focused on efficiency, expertise, and “objective consciousness.”[2]

Many other factors contributed as well: The continuing distrust of established government combined with the unpopularity of the Vietnam War; the increasing awareness, particularly among white youth, of racial inequality (picking up where the Jazz era had left off); and the birth of modern rock music. Everything combining together at one point in history created the perfect garden for the germination of massive cultural rebellion.

There was and has been no decade like the Sixties. Never had “cool” become so central to an entire culture like it did in America. In fact so popular had the concept of “cool” become that mass marketing advertisers picked up on it and began to sell “cool” back to its originators. Thus was born every Levi Jeans commercial which, communicating nothing about jeans, shows us carefree teenagers running on the beach while a voice tells us they are pioneering a new way of life. But “cool” could never really be bought, hence Dr. Smith’s focus on poser in his criticism of McCracken’s work. Real authentic “cool”, during the Sixties, came out of places like Haight-Ashbury in California, the epicenter for hippie culture.

The Haight-Ashbury group was very different from their politically minded brothers and sisters of the Free Speech Movement at Berkley’s campus. While the students at Berkley were attempting to change the world through politics and through pressuring the established authority structures, the Hippies were interested in simply abandoning that world and creating an entirely different culture. Haight-Ashbury became the scene of this counter-culture. Here drugs, sex, and rock n’ roll reigned and the political and social chaos of the world around them could be closed out. Cool in this context became about community and about love, and abandoning the world order. What happened, however, was quite the opposite. As more young teenagers flooded Haight-Ashbury more and more corporate capitalists sat up and began to take notice. They eventually co-opted the attitude and look of the Hippies and began to turn it into a profit. So McCracken notes that “Trends that were initially intended to be transgressive acts of rebellion in the sixties – like long hair on men, miniskirts, blue jeans, and bell-bottoms – quickly showed up in Ladies’ Home Journal ads or on the racks at Macy’s.” The legacy of “cool” which the Sixties passed down, then, became this weird mixed bag of both individualism and self-expression and mainstream popularity. McCracken states that this made cool “infinitely more fleeting.” “Hipsters were forced, then, to become even more evasive, more transgressive, more shocking, more innovative, and elusive.”[3]